Car 1 SEBASTIAN VETTEL, Position: 2nd, (3rd Practice – P9, 1:39.695)“McLaren looked very competitive yesterday; I know the conditions were completely different, but youcould see they were a fair chunk ahead of everyone else, including us. They looked extremely quick thismorning in the dry also, but I think once again we pushed them very hard in qualifying and got closerthan I think they, and we, expected. So, I think we did a good job. We also saved all our soft tyres,which I think will be crucial for tomorrow. We only had a rough idea from this morning with more fuel inthe car, but I think we are in a good position. There’s not a long run to the first corner and Turn 3 is alittle bit exposed, so we’ll see. It’s a long race, a lot of things can happen and I think tyre wear will becrucial.”
Car 2 MARK WEBBER, Position: 4th, (3rd Practice – P3, 1:37.723)“On the last run, I lost the rear a little bit on the exit of Turn 1. I tried to get it back through Turn 3, but Iwas down 3/10 of a second; it’s a pity as you’re not going to get that back in the last sector – whichhadn’t been too bad on the previous run. So, we’re fourth tomorrow to start. It’s a shame that Jenson gotme in the end there, as it bumped me onto the left hand side of the grid, but we’ll see how we gotomorrow in the race. Tyres are going to be interesting tomorrow, as there were different strategies inqualifying. We’re closer to the McLarens than we thought and it was a well fought contest between thefour of us.”
CHRISTIAN HORNER: “Well, for the first time since Brazil last year we didn’t make the pole positiontoday, but it was a very exciting qualifying session and Sebastian produced a stunning lap to split thetwo McLarens and be on the front row. Mark backed that up with fourth. We elected to take a differentapproach to others with our tyre usage in qualifying, which has saved us three sets of the soft tyre fortomorrow’s race, should that come into play. It’s going to be a fascinating race with strategy and pit-workand hopefully we can take the fight to the McLaren’s.”
(Renault) CYRIL DUMONT: “So, I’m a bit disappointed and would of course have preferred to havecontinued grabbing pole positions and not end our impressive sequence of sixteen pole positions, butwith the lack of running we had yesterday, it was pretty difficult to get a nice programme this morning.Overall, I think we should be happy with P2 and P4 to start the race tomorrow.”
Head of Trackside Electronics Gill Jones is the woman who keeps the sparks flying at Red Bull Racing.Here she recalls being put in at the deep end in China….
THE FIRST TIME I RAN TRACKSIDE ELECTRONICS FOR RED BULL RACING (GILL JONES)I’m responsible for all the electronic items in the garage and on the car, which means everything from thesteering wheel, the in-car wiring, the sensors, to the onboard computer, all of it. And in the background,there’s also the data acquisition, which means the telemetry system, as well as the radio and intercomsystems. Plus, we look after the wiring in the garage and the KERS package, so pretty much anything witha wire on it, we look after. I started out with Jaguar Racing having done an electronics engineeringdegree. I then went to Toyota and worked on Olivier Panis’s car and then to Honda to work on TakumaSato’s car. It was after that I came back to Milton Keynes and Red Bull Racing to look after the electronicsat races and tests. My first race looking after that was the 2005 Chinese GP, which was the final race ofthe season. I went to shadow the guy who was doing it, but I also did the specific car support engineerrole for that race to get familiar with everything. It wasn’t a total baptism of fire but it was still prettytough, as the systems the team had were totally different to what I was used to; it was a pretty steeplearning curve and I was thrown into it pretty quickly.
They literally sat me down and said ‘right, you’re running the car this weekend, get on with it’! I started the job the day I flew out to China. I didn’t have any time in the factory or anything – straight into it. I was working on Christian Klien’s car and did the support engineer’s role. I think he had his best finish of the season; he finished fifth and scored four points. You’d then think that having the whole winter to get settled would be great, but that was year we went from Cosworth to Ferrari, so it was a massive change. That winter was incredibly busy as all thesystems changed and you have start again almost from scratch. Most people think that electronics are justthere, that it just happens but we design, build, test and inspect all of these systems almost completely inhouse.It’s a massive job. My first race in charge of the whole thing would have been the first race of the2006 season – Bahrain, I think. It must have gone smoothly because I can’t really remember that muchabout it!
